Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/134

120 Even before the war unionized labor was increasing its wages per hour and shortening its hours. The exigencies of the war constrained us to an accession to all of its demands. Since the war its policy has been simply to hold what it got. It is, however, defeating its own aims by carrying the parasitic theory too far. The theory of the residual claimancy of labor in itself implies that labor is getting all that there is for it without being parasitic and beginning to do damage. When it goes further it not only begins to do damage to the whole economic organism, but also inevitably it starts to prey upon itself.

When I am on a railway journey and the conductor comes through the train I look upon him with resentment as a symbol of what has caused my railway fare to be 1.8 times what it used to be. He, himself, has a grouch on his face, and although he is probably thinking that upon the completion of his run he will take a spin in the automobile that he did not use to have, he is resentful over the increase in his rent for which the building mechanics are responsible, and the high cost of the anthracite coal that he is putting in his celler lest next winter he may not be able to get any owing to the policy of the anthracite coal miners. The anthracite coal miners and the builders themselves are grouchy over the high cost of all the things they have to buy, toward which the railway men are contributory. Thus, even the aristocrats of labor consume each other and raise living costs against themselves.

So it goes down the line until we come to the clerks and other branches of the white collar class and to the farmers who not being able to prey upon anybody else become the general victims. We might simply be sorry